Drew Minhhttp://minhim.al
Gradually the whole picture emergesSun, 04 Jan 2015 17:27:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Impressionshttp://minhim.al/impressions/
http://minhim.al/impressions/#commentsSun, 04 Jan 2015 17:20:44 +0000http://minhim.al/?p=87Having a nearly 4 year old daughter obliges me – in a way – to see the world through her eyes. Everything I do around her is filtered through her eyes and I try to perceive things as she would. The world strange, bold, full of surprises. If you look at the world in this way you don’t categorize things like an adult does. You don’t filter the essential and the trivial. It is all of equal importance. It’s an interesting, yet impracticable game to play as an adult.

I watch movies in a totally different way now. If I can escape for a moment into her world, the suspension of disbelief is back. There’s an unchecked joy and terror in the plight of a little clown fish lost in the deep, dark sea. I’m mesmerized and delighted with the adventures of superhero penguins. Part of the problem with becoming an adult is the meta-critique that shrouds experience. In this day it’s even more pronounced with real-time sharing on social media. The age of transparency has brought us the age of self-curation for our audiences. Does this movie or artistic experience fall in line with my “brand of self”? What rating does it have? What have the influencers in my newsfeed said? Are people talking about it on my wall? Will they approve of my status update or check-in? And then we have layers of critical theory and political correctness; filters of irony, post and meta modernism. Like a thousand voices in our heads, a committee arbitrating our experience. Our own subconscious comintern, watering down our experience to please the greatest amount of people. Utilitarianism, “the common good”. What a dull way of looking at life. Maybe our kids are onto something…

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http://minhim.al/2003/#commentsSun, 04 Jan 2015 00:36:23 +0000http://minhim.al/?p=75So one of the resolutions I have for 2015 is to keep a blog – yep, just like it was 2003 all over again when all the cool kids were blogging. Now that we’re all supposed to post on Facebook and share ephemerally via Snapchat, it’s a little absurd to even think about blogging, not to mention host your own site on an open source CMS that – yikes – you have to actually maintain.

My reason – I guess you can call this my manifesto – for adding a blog to this little vanity page, is that I’m not an avid Facebooker, and certainly not popular enough to beat the edge rank algorithm if I want to get a message out. Some people are good at that. They’re natural-born populists, masters of the pithy status update, posters of the funniest pics, crowd-pleasers. I admit, I’m not one of those who’ve cracked the code – and when I have tried, it lasted all of a couple weeks before I realized how consumed I was with making clever-sounding comments and brooding over my next play on the social networks. The crazy thing is I do this for a living and I daresay I’m good at it, otherwise I’d be out of a job. It’s like when I write fiction. The universe is mine to create. The possibilities are infinite. There’s a freedom to operating in the third person. Give me a character, a voice, and I’ll run with it.

On thirds: this is my third blog – my first since moving back to the states. I’ll try it keep it more personal, and less ambitious than my first two blogs, Guirilandia and Kovaks PI – both inspired by my life in Barcelona. I’m not going to belabor the perfect post or story here. That’ll be setting myself up for blogging burn out.